Cheryl's View // Desoto Falls Recreation Area - Cleveland, Georgia

For the first time in ages, I camped out. I actually agreed to the whole tent, cooler and camp fire experience. I can't remember the last time I went camping. I'm sure it was when my children were very young. I was really expecting this to be an unpleasant experience at best but I had a blast!

We arrived just before dark and started setting things up and all I have to say is thank heavens for instant tents. They are a marvelous invention, we had the camp site completely set up in less than 20 minutes. I remember it taking much longer years ago.

Desoto Falls Recreational Area was very easy to locate. You turn off of Hwy 129 into the campground. There is a parking area at the very front of the campground where hikers park to hike the trails to the waterfalls located within the area. There are fees to enter the campground. We paid $3.00 per day for our vehicle and $12.00 per night for our camp site. There are 24 camp sites in the campground. They are first come first serve, so you can't make reservations.

They have what they call an upper loop which is close to the road and has a great deal of road noise and a lower loop we which is very close to the Frogtown Creek. They have bathrooms with shower stalls at the entrance to the loops and they have what they refer to as chemical facilities at the back of the loop. The campground was very clean and they have a host family that stays in the campground and makes several trips around the park daily to ensure that things are running smoothly. They have also a dumpster located at the front beside the parking area as you come in.We stayed on the upper loop (camp site #6) which was close to the entrance and backed up to the road. It was noisy, very noisy, but it didn't really bother us to much because we live in an area where we hear road noise daily. The camp sites are all similar. They all have a marked camp site area, a picnic table, lamp post, and camp fire ring with attached grill. The camp sites where clean and there was plenty of room to set up anything you may have needed.

The only negative thing to say? YELLOW JACKETS....but hey, we are in the woods in Georgia. They are going to be there along with other creepy crawly things. The only bad thing is....They like me much better than I like them! Don't forget your bug spray!

We visited two waterfalls in the area while we were there. We went to upper falls first, which is about 3/4 mile hike. The hiking trail runs beside the Frogtown Creek and there are a few benches along the way for you to sit and rest if you need to. It is a fairly easy hike but you could easily get winded at this elevation.

Upper Falls is the larger of the two waterfalls. We were told that there is usually more water flowing than what we had the pleasure of seeing that weekend. We hiked to Lower Falls after completing our hike to Upper Falls. The hike to lower falls was a bit more steep but a good bit shorter at only 1/4 mile. Lower Falls had very little water while we were there, but we were told that they hadn't had very much rain. I believe it was still worth the hike.

We saw this big guy sunbathing in Frogtown Creek. I guess even a copperhead wanted to get a tan.

We saw several of these signs throughout the park.  We were told that there was an active bear in the park the night before we arrived and the first night that we stayed. He must have been hungry because he hijacked a cooler.